Based in India, OICL wanted to integrate its 26 regional offices and more than 900 operating offices across the country with a unified portal that catered to its customers and agents.

Because their legacy application infrastructure core did not support web services, OICL is using Sun software infrastructure technologies to create a web services layer to expose their core insurance services and SOA enable their application infrastructure.

OICL's new web
portal facilitates transactions and claims management for 8,000
customers, agents and third party agencies by providing secure
Web-based access to legacy insurance applications. In addition, OICL uses Sun
SPARC based Solaris systems to run all of the software from
end-to-end.

Congratulations to everyone involved in this milestone launch! You can see the press releases here.

I won't reiterate the announcements in this post. Instead, I'll give
you some pointers to blogs by our marketing & engineering team
members (all of who are sleep deprived and over caffinated at this
point).

Kevin Schmidt's blog gives a nice overview
of the three announcements & how they relate to each other. We also
managed to grab Kevin to sit down with Chhandomay for a few minutes
& tape a Sun News Radio podcast on todays news:

Wednesday Dec 09, 2009

It's great to see the ongoing momentum and support that open source
software is finding by United States government. The White House recently announced its Open Government Directive - an initiative requiring each federal agency to make high value data
publicly available and to also quickly come up with formal open
government plans.
Click here for the announcement on the White House blog and also be sure to check out a statement from Open Source for America!

Today, Sun is announcing a new version of Java
Enterprise System - Release 7 (Java ES R7) and a updated release of GlassFish
Portfolio. The new Java ES R7 and GlassFish
Portfolio releases include updates to the individual software
components and some notable new features. Over on Ed
Conzel's blog, he lists out the details on what's new in the Java ES R7 and GlassFish
Portfolio releases.

Java Enterprise System – Release 7Java ES is a comprehensive set of
subscription-based services that combines software, support,
professional services, and educational services into a single package
with a simplified price. All products within Java ES are coordinated
during development and released along
identical time lines. Java ES
is comprised of several Java
System Suites, which allows customers to purchase components based on
their business requirements. And then, as business needs change, they
can easily add additional Suites.

Built on leading open source projects including: Apache Tomcat,Ruby,
PHP, Liferay Portal and GlassFish, the Sun GlassFish Portfolio packages
these components into a complete, pre-integrated and fully-tested open
source platform, resulting in increased productivity and faster time to
market.

Friday Dec 04, 2009

In October and November, members of our sales, marketing and engineering teams combined forces for a "road show" highlighting some of Sun's open standards-based software products, including GlassFish Portfolio, JavaFX and MySQL.

If you didn't get a chance to attend in person, I've got good news for you - the team has just launched a website that contains all the presentations from the event plus product whitepapers, customer case studies, ROI calculator, videos, interactive tours and galleries.

It's a great resource for people to learn more about the features and benefits of the products, as well as how Sun's software solutions can reduce your application
costs by up to 90% while significantly improving your price/performance.